Journal

Thursday, September 22, 11.33 PM. I’m just about to start writing the first lines of this blog. It took me 10 minutes to prepare myself a tea, and in the meantime my computer was already booting up and my email anxiously inviting me start working in only 30 seconds. And yes, it took me 10 whole minutes of my precious time to make myself a cup of tea.

I had intended to write a blog on Love and Vanity as the fuel of revenue & success in many social media business models…but I think I will write it some other time, today I would like to talk about time. But, as always, I am running out of it, so I better start right NOW.

The illusion of being able to compete with the passage of time has been an engine of change. We were taught in college that time is only a convention that prevents us from getting lost in the nebula and also something that helps us organize ourselves as a society. And that, in fact, acts like a countdown that inevitably leads us to THE END we all know… So, except for Keith Richards who is immortal, we are all doomed to suffer the same fate.

That’s where our dearest friend SPEED makes its entrance; to compete with the inevitability of time that “is” just moving and moving forward without asking permission.

Therefore, trying to convert 8 hours of work into 12 (because we need to rest too) we train and demand the most of our brain. We use all kinds of artifacts to increase speed, to be productive. We train, we organize, we seek more efficient software, the latest hardware, we add monitors to see more screens at once, and even automate everything so that we can optimize our resources through technology, to make the right decisions and perform better. All these techniques just to maximize the productivity of our hours in a market where TIME IS MONEY.

I’m going to bed with one thought still buzzing in my brain…If the market TEMPO is given by the speed of processors and technology then that requires us to rise to the challenge … perhaps what science fiction coined “the rise of the machines” has indeed already arrived, and we are only an automaton that slowly keeps loosing its creative thought.